Boston Psychoanalytic Society

The Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute is a psychoanalytic research, training, education facility that is affiliated with the American Psychoanalytic Association and the International Psychoanalytic Association. There were no psychoanalytic societies devoted to Sigmund Freud in Boston prior to his visit to Worcester, Massachusetts in 1909, though after 1909 there were individuals interested in Freud's writings, including James Jackson Putnam, L. Eugene Emerson, Isador Coriat, William Healy, and Augusta Bronner. The present society and institute (abbreviated BPSI) was founded by psychoanalyst Franz Alexander only after 1931. The BPSI is the third oldest psychoanalytic institute in the United States; only the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis are older.

Major psychoanalysts who have been associated with the institute include Franz Alexander, Hans Sachs, Helene Deutsch, Felix Deutsch, Hans and Greta Bibring, Ives Hendrix, and more recently Philip Holzman and Arnold Modell. In its early years, the Department of Psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital was strongly associated with BPSI, especially through its first chief Stanley Cobb.